This spring, for the first time since I started writing about politics a decade ago, I found myself completely depressed by a campaign. “How am I ever going to get through it?” is not the question you want to be asking yourself as you enter what are supposed to be the pinnacle few months of your profession.

He’s not alone. Reporters on the campaign trail tell Capitol Hill Blue that the fun has gone out of covering what used to be the Greatest Political Show on Earth.

“It’s a never ending, around-the-clock grind driven by an unforgiving 24-hour news cycle dominating by spin, partisan blogs and media manipulators,” complains free-lance writer Cal Rogers, who said this is his last campaign.

Walter Shapiro is covering his ninth presidential campaign.

“This is worse than normal, a lot less fun,” he tells Politico.

Former New York Post reporter Maggie Haberman, covering the 2012 race for Politico, says:

People are feeling grateful that it’s almost over. There has been this ongoing lack of enthusiasm. Neither side seems to be enjoying this race — not the Democrats or the Republicans, and not the reporters.

Capitol Hill Blue publisher Doug Thompson, who covered several presidential races as a newspaper reporter and worked as a media consultant in the 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign, says the joylessness is a reflection of the national mood:

We see too much anger, too much bitterness, too much despair — not only in politics but also in the American psyche. People look at those seeking elected office and ask: “Is that all there is.” Reporters follow the candidates around and realize there is no substance in the national dialog, just a drone of shallowness and partisan hyperbole.

Thompson missed last week’s Republican convention when his mother died just as the GOP confab began. On Monday, he decided to skip the Democratic convention in Charlotte, just a 9-minute drive from his home in the Southwestern Virginia mountains.

I’m going to climb on my Harley-Davidson, ride the open-road, and go in search of America. It’s out there somewhere. It’s not in Charlotte, it wasn’t in Tampa and it sure as hell is not on the campaign trail.

6 COMMENTS

Maybe if Americans (and especially those so-called “journalists”) could get over this ridiculous idea that political campaigns were supposed to be entertaining we could shorten the whole process to a few weeks and save a lot of money too.

There have been some threats and some angry outbursts fron the folks outside the facility. My worry would be for Romney after the election because if he is elected, the Evangelicals will never let him in the White House. At this time in our history, it is the time for our first Evangelical President. Paul Ryan is the choice and the time is 2013.

If reporters would investigate and report the news instead of parrot every line they are fed then we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I’ve little to no respect left for political shills passed off as White House correspondents.

“The Administration will cut us off if we don’t do what they say!”

Well then report that and tell everyone how they bully the press and how it’s essentially an assault on liberty! Reporters aren’t doing the job so I hope they are miserable. I hope it all comes crashing down around but slow enough so they can wonder if their salary was worth selling out a nation and future generations.

People are waking up just like the reporters. The bloom is off the rose. If you look at the massive security for both conventions, then the political employees know it too. If the politicians are so afraid of the public that elected them, then they should retire, and get out.

I started my own political work for Ike., It was easy as he won the war in Europe for all of us. Even then I saw anger and division but nothing that I’ve seen in the last 25 years.

Of course I was ignorant of the machinations behind the elections and my reading 3 newspapers a day and several magazines like “Time” did not begin to give me a cross section of the nature of the voters themselves.

It was the Internet that exposed an America so full of hatred and even racism that shook the hell out of my ability to understand or determine a fix,. I tried so hard to promote the equality of all of us but there were times I was yelling out my opinions to an empty house.

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